Tape or another data center/Host is the only way to go. Preferably behind a firewall. If all else fails a regular download to your local machine which is not connected to the net or sits behind a real firewall.

Right. RAID just makes a real-time copy of the hard drive. If the files on the hard drive get deleted/corrupted, the RAID copy likewise gets deleted/corrupted.

I use a daily cron job that runs rsync (http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/) to synchronize the files on a remote server. This is an incremental backup, so I could recreate the state of the hard disk for any day up to 7 days ago. The backup server has access to read the main server and no more. The main server has no access to the backup server.

It actually came in handy when the disk on my RackShack AMD Duron got corrupted just last Sunday, and their techs claimed that they could do nothing except restore the hard drive. I had a 20 hour old backup and managed to get my sites up and running in a few hours using the backup (after my hardware was operational again).

It was a bit of a pain to restore things because my backup only backed up data, not software (which I had to reinstall). If I had configured the backup to also get the software that I installed, it could have been a near-instantaneous restore. (Hmm, I could have found the files for all the software by doing a "find /" based on date.)

Originally posted by Furton
I've never backed up my server, even when upgrading stuff like forums and news system's.

I would backup my server if I could find a program that would do it all for me, say every 24 hours.

Actually, it is quite an easy thing to do if you have a good control panel or SSH/telnet. Depending on what forums you use, you can setup a cronjob to automatically backup the mysql databases on your site. You should backup your site with the tar command. To find the appropriate tar command, login to your server via SSH and type man tar.